Well into the nineteen fifties -- long after that thick dark hair had
thinned
-- science-fiction readers encountered a photograph of Robert Heinlein
showing him as a theatrically handsome young man. It appeared on the
back
covers of his paperback books, on the back flaps of his hardcovers, and
occasionally alongside a thumbnail biography of the kind that used to
be
common in SF magazines. You can see the same photo on the back of the
dustcover
of Grumbles from the Grave or the back jacket flap
of the uncut
version of Stranger in a Strange Land. Near the
photo usually appeared
a recital of the occupations Heinlein had tried before becoming a
writer.
One of the fields that was typically mentioned was politics.

Just politics.
It never said Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal or
radical,
New Deal or Normalcy or No Third Term -- let alone hint at the wilder
slogans
of offbeat parties and movements, like Share the Wealth, Every Man a
King,
Production for Use, Thirty Dollars Every Thursday, One World or None,
that
once excited rallies and made headlines.

"He tried
his hand at silver mining, politics, real estate, without conspicuous
success,"
was the way Damon Knight put it in his introduction to Heinlein's
Future
History collection ThePast Through
Tomorrow (Putnam, 1967).
It was generic politics, you see, as bland as
cornflakes. No content,
no controversy.

This became
all the stranger as Heinlein's career progressed and he did not shy
away
from controversy. He took a public stand against restrictions on
nuclear
testing in 1956 (see the ad that he wrote for full-page publication in
his local Colorado Springs newspapers, later reprinted in Expanded
Universe
under the title "Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?"), and spoke in
favor
of bomb shelters and unregistered guns in his guest-of-honor speech at
the 1961 World SF Convention (reprinted in Requiem).
He let his
name be published in an ad supporting the Vietnam war when it was a
hotly
debated issue. Later Heinlein had a public falling-out with his old
friend
Arthur C. Clarke over the Reagan administration's controversial
Strategic
Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), as documented in Requiem.

But no
specifics were forthcoming on his early political involvement. When
Alexei
Panshin tried to gather some biographical material for a chapter in his
critical work Heinlein in Dimension (Advent,
1968), Heinlein and
his friends rebuffed him.1

And Sam Moskowitz
has revealed that Heinlein responded to an early request for
information
on his background with a six-thousand-word letter and then forbade
Moskowitz
to publish the information it contained until after Heinlein's death.2
Subsequently it is reported that Heinlein's widow, Virginia, demanded
the
letter back from Moskowitz, nullifying the permission it contained from
Heinlein to use it after he had died.3

Of the four new
books of Heinlein's that have come out since his death -- Grumbles
From
theGrave,
a volume of heavily edited letters; Requiem,
a potpourri consisting mainly of unpublished speeches and unreprinted
stories,
along with some reminiscences by others; Tramp Royale, a
travel
book from the fifties that found no publisher then; and, most recently,
Take
Back Your Government! which Heinlein wrote in 1946 as a
practical guide
to politicking and never sold -- none elucidates the mystery of his
prewar
political activity.

I first saw Take
Back Your Government! in the Heinlein archives at the
University of
California at Santa Cruz; it took the form of a finished,
professionally
typed manuscript, with the title How to Bea
Politician. I
had no time to read it on my one-day visit, but I recall glancing
through
it, thinking it might resolve everyone's questions about the author's
early
political affiliations and activities.

It was finally
published in a great hurry during the election year of 1992 with an
American
flag on the front and Ross Perot's name in a quotation on the back. "I
would hope that every Perot supporter would read this book prior to the
fall campaign," Jerry Pournelle is quoted as saying -- though it's not
clear where the quotation is drawn from, since the closest formulation
inside reads: "If you look to H. Ross Perot to lead the nation to
salvation,
you particularly need this book."

You could read
Dr. Pournelle as favoring Perot or expecting that Heinlein's how-to
manual
will help you see through him. That ambiguity reflects Heinlein's own
equivocal
stance throughout the book. He argues strongly -- and persuasively --
in
favor of being "party regular," binding oneself to a caucus, and voting
a straight ticket whenever it is morally possible; but he doesn't say which
party.
He takes no stand for or against either of America's mainline parties.
He poses "important" questions which he says are ultimately answered by
elections (schools, roads, fair-employment laws, foreign policy, etc.)
-- but he provides no answers. The text is replete with phrases like
"the
South Side (Republican) (Democratic) Club" (p. 56) and "the Oak Center
State Republodem Club" (p. 93).

This neutral stance
might seem less odd in a successful book, one that had sold when
written.
But the Heinlein how-to book on politics is notable in that it did not
sell in 1946. It clearly represented strongly held ideas and a great
deal
of disciplined work; nevertheless it was allowed to sit in the files
for
almost half a century. Heinlein surely knew that it could be made more
salable by identifying figures like the one mentioned on page 188, of
whom
he says: "He is nationally known but I shall not name him"; it's hard
to
imagine that none of the editors to whom he submitted it made such a
suggestion.
Yet well-known figures remain anonymous, and even the state where his
political
activity took place is not identified.

The only specifics
about Heinlein's political career in this book occur in Dr. Pournelle's
introduction to his notes. Unfortunately, these specifics are, as we
shall
see, wrong.

And so we still
know from his published writings almost nothing of Heinlein's early
political
activity. In the travel book, of all places, he states that he has
engaged
in politics that were "well to the left" of McCarthy's (p.62) -- but
since
it is Joe McCarthy of whom he speaks, not Mary or Eugene, he has not
told
us very much.

What we find in
his work are hints, tantalizing and mysterious. In a foreword to his
story
"A Bathroom of Her Own" on its appearance in ExpandedUniverse
(Grosset
& Dunlap, 1980), Heinlein wrote: "Any old pol will recognize
the politics
in this story as the Real McCoy. Should be. Autobiographical in many
details.
Which details? Show me a warrant and I'll take the Fifth." One of these
details shows up as early in the story as the third paragraph.
Unfortunately,
you won't recognize it as such without first knowing more; let me point
it out later.

There
were hints elsewhere, too.
In Anthony Boucher's 1942 whodunit à clef, Rocket to the
Morgue,
a
Heinleinlike writer chats with the detective:

"Now for instance in this story: I'm writing about a world in which
Upton
Sinclair won the EPIC campaign here in California, but Landon beat
Roosevelt
in '36. As a result California drifts more to the left and the nation
to
the extreme right until there is civil war, ending in the establishment
on the west coast of the first English-speaking socialist republic.
[...]"
"What's its name?"
"EPIC. [...] Only it won't be under my name; it'll be by Robert Hadley.
"Why?"
"Because all the Austin Carter stories have to fit that chart over
there.
[...]"

The chart in the
story was the fictional version of the Future History chart, into which
all the early stories published under the name Heinlein fitted; in
Boucher's
murder mystery, set in the science-fiction community of prewar Los
Angeles,
Austin Carter was a character modeled closely on Robert Heinlein.4

The quoted dialog may mean that the foray into politics that Heinlein
mentions
so fleetingly involved support for or association with Upton Sinclair.
Sinclair was a socialist who won the Democratic Party nomination for
Governor
of California in 1934 on a platform to "End Poverty In California."

The EPIC plan
was a radical one, in the sense of seeking the roots of the problems of
the dormant economy; it involved the state government renting idle
factories
and fallow land in exchange for tax credits, and having the unemployed
and the homeless use the rented property to farm, build living
quarters,
manufacture products, and then barter their goods with others. The
plan,
whose slogan was "Production for Use," was described as socialist by
Sinclair's
opponents, and the national Democratic leaders supported neither it nor
Sinclair.

Of course, Boucher's
dialog might mean nothing. After all, it is just two fictional
characters
discussing a fictional work of fiction.

It was to hints
like these that one used to have to turn for illumination of Heinlein's
early involvement in politics. He said in various places that he
started
writing as a way of paying off a mortgage after a failed political
campaign,
but he did not reveal what he had been running for, on what platform,
or
-- except that it somehow ended in defeat -- what happened to his
candidacy.

When I heard that
the political how-to manual that I had seen in manuscript at UCSC was
being
edited and rushed into print in 1992 to ride on the surge of political
books coming out that year, I feared that it would be watered down to
nothing,
as apparently happened to the book of correspondence.5
But as far as I can tell, this did not happen; I had time during my
visit
to UCSC only to scan through the book and make notes from its extensive
table of contents, but I see no sign of anything missing and the book
as
published has the same flavor as the manuscript I saw. The preface, in
particular, with its summary of Heinlein's roles in unidentified
political
campaigns concluding with the statement that he has had his telephone
tapped,
reads the same. Perhaps we can thank the editor's devotion for
preserving
the text, or perhaps the rush to get it into print meant that there was
just not time for the Heinlein estate to insist on changes. (Poumelle
explains
on p. 288 that he had to work at "blinding speed" and therefore could
not
offer more extensive notes.)

Unfortunately,
it turns out that there wasn't much information about Heinlein's
political
career there to start with. Heinlein himself had taken care of that.

But the book does
contain a number of personal anecdotes, some of them revealing to those
who know details of his life. For instance, on page 101, Heinlein
describes
a speaking engagement at what was undoubtedly the Third World Science
Fiction
Convention in Denver in 1941 -- the Denvention at which he was the
guest
of honor. He doesn't identify it as an SF worldcon; he leads into it by
saying, "[...] shortly before the war, [...] I was invited to be a
keynote
speaker at a convention held in another state." The general reader is
left
to suppose that it was a political convention.

And he goes on
to describe the circumstances: "The speech was electrically recorded;
it
is terrifying to think of that disc going around and around, recording
inexorably your pauses, your errors in grammar, your word blunders. I
prepared
a written manuscript [...] I found I did not need it. I spoke for one
hour
and forty-five minutes, extemporaneously, and kept the crowd with me.
The
recording was transcribed, printed, and bound, and the speech was sold
(not by me) as a pamphlet which ran through two editions."

This is exactly
what happened with his Denvention speech; Walt Daugherty made the
recording
on phonograph discs and Forrest J Ackerman published the transcribed
speech
in a small mimeographed pamphlet. (The speech also appears in Requiem,
just
as transcribed by Ackerman except for the removal of some flubs by the
speaker and all exchanges with the audience, including his first wife's
one-word contribution -- "sacred" -- which Heinlein asked her to
supply.)6

Heinlein finishes
this account by saying of the published speech, "I still get occasional
fan mail about it." He must have had a twinkle in his eye writing that
sentence.

(The speech, both
as published by Ackerman and in its appearance in Requiem, starts
with a reference to Upton Sinclair's style of public speaking. The only
other reference to Sinclair that I have been able to find in Heinlein's
work occurs in the early story "Lost Legacy," first published in 1941
under
a pen name. This story, by the way, written in 1939, includes many of
the
themes later explored in Stranger in a Strange Land; even
that book's
title can be found there.)

On page 183, he
tells an anecdote of how his wife affected the outcome of a
gubernatorial
campaign with a cookie cutter. (This was his first wife, Leslyn
MacDonald
Heinlein, by the way; Pournelle's note on page 277 identifies his wife
as Virginia Heinlein, neglecting to point out that his widow was his
second
wife, and raising the possibility of confusion over which wife Heinlein
mentions in the book.

(At the time of
writing, Heinlein was still married to Leslyn Heinlein. It has been
reported
that Heinlein, like many divorced men, did not like hearing references
to his first wife; but if he meant what he said in decrying the
Communists'
rewriting of history to eliminate "unpersons" -- see Requiem, p.185 --
then it's hard to believe that he would have allowed this ambiguity if
he had lived to see the book published.)

But the cookie-cutter
anecdote is dry as sawdust. As elsewhere in the book, the details that
would have fired interest are omitted; the names of the politicians
between
whom his wife helped make peace are not given, and neither the issue
that
separated them nor the campaign that was helped thereby is identified.
The book would make much better reading if Heinlein had not taken this
purposely vague stance throughout; perhaps it might have interested a
publisher
enough to get into print. Surely Heinlein knew this -- in 1946 he was
an
experienced writer. There must have been some reason Heinlein did not
care
to get specific.

On page 126 appears
his only comment on his own campaign. "You are hardly ever licked by
the
opposition; you are licked by your own friends who did not vote," he
says,
and goes on to tell how he lost an election by "less than 400 votes" --
an election he believes he could have won if he had had forty more
workers
to get out all the votes pledged to him.

That's
all he says about his election race. It is left for Jerry Pournelle to
pass
along something that he says Heinlein told him years later, when
Pournelle
was working for Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty. In his introduction to his
notes (p.269), Dr. Pournelle describes the young Heinlein as "beginning
his political career as a moderate Democrat" whose "attempts at
electoral
office ended when he was defeated for the Democratic nomination to the
California State Assembly by an up and coming Irish Los Angeles
politician
named Sam Yorty, who went on to win the Assembly seat, and later to
become
mayor of the City of Angels."

Unlike the reference
to Virginia Heinlein as Heinlein's wife, this isn't merely potentially
misleading; it's just not so. Oddly, the one specific that Virginia
Heinlein
supplies about the same election -- that Heinlein lost "by one vote per
precinct" (Requiem, p. 205) -- also turns out to be
false.

Heinlein ran for
the Democratic nomination for the state assembly seat for the 59th
Assembly
District in 1938. No Democrat opposed him. His opposition was the
longtime
Republican incumbent in the Assembly seat, Charles W. Lyon, a
fifty-year-old
lawyer who had first been elected to the legislature in 1914.

But even unopposed
by any Democrat in the primary, Heinlein did not make it to the general
election. At that time California allowed a form of cross-filing by
which
a candidate of one party could run in another party's primary as well
as
in the primary of his or her own party. If a candidate won both
primaries
in a two-party race, that candidate won the election right there,
without
having to face anyone in the general election.7

This is what Lyon
did. He entered the race against Heinlein in the Democratic primary,
while
opposing three other Republicans in his own party's primary. Despite
the
fact that the Los Angeles Times endorsed one of
the other Republicans
-- the incumbent wasn't conservative enough for the Times of
that
day -- Lyon beat all the members of his own party, while amassing more
votes among registered Democrats than Heinlein got.8

Just
before the primary, Lyon announced
that if re-elected, he would introduce a bill to provide a break on
real-estate
taxes and one to help finance old-age pensions.9

Several of the
Los Angeles daily papers ran news stories on this promise. Did this
affect
the outcome of the election? At this remove it is hard to tell -- any
more
than one can tell what the effect if any was of the similarity between
Heinlein's name and that of the Nazi Sudetenland dictator Konrad
Henlein,
which as Heinlein comments on page 244 of Take Back Your
Government!
was
frequently in the news that year -- but it seems certain that it was
intended
to.

The primary was
held Tuesday, August 30th, 1938, and the results are reported in the
Los
Angeles Times
for Thursday, September lst. Lyon beat Heinlein by
5,251 to 4,791 (with 175 of 189 precincts reporting). The additional 14
precincts presumably cut the margin down to the heartbreaking
difference
of fewer than 400 that Heinlein mentions. (Note that since there were
189
precincts in the 59th Assembly District, "less than 400" is more than
one
vote per precinct; surely Heinlein in 1946 would have referred to a
difference
of 189 votes as less than 200.) Because Lyon had won both the
Republican
and Democratic nominations and there were no candidates of other
parties
in the race, the 59th District seat did not even appear on the ballot
for
the November election.10

As for Yorty,
he ran in another district -- the 64th, where he was already the
incumbent,
having first been elected in 1936.

When Heinlein
told Pournelle that Yorty beat him, he may have meant Yorty got more
votes
in the 64th district than Heinlein did in the 59th.11
Or maybe he simply meant that Yorty won his primary, while Heinlein
lost
his.

Or Heinlein might
have forgotten the complicated details over the years. This would
square
with Virginia Heinlein's misinformation about the race being lost by
one
vote per precinct; she presumably was told this by her husband, and the
change from the "less than 400 votes" he remembered when he wrote the
1946
book and the "one vote per precinct" that he mentioned to his second
wife
later could have resulted from a memory growing increasingly vague as
the
events receded in time.

Against that theory,
however, stands the clear memory of earlier events he reveals in Expanded
Universe, where he relates an involved incident from 1931
when he was
in the Navy (pp. 452-457), and recalls details from his college years
(p.
355).

So it may be that
Heinlein preferred at some level not to mention the facts of his
political
race, even to a close friend, and to substitute a version that made a
better
story. Heinlein was a storyteller, after all, and we have seen with his
use of the Denvention appearance that he did not find it beneath him to
create a false impression if his words were literally true.

After all, it
must have been especially frustrating to have to explain how, in a
Democratic
year when the gubernatorial and Senate candidates both won, he was
defeated
by a Republican in a Democratic primary.